Bibliographic Indeterminacy and the Scale of Problems and Opportunities of “Rights” in Digital Collection Building

Bibliographic Indeterminacy and the Scale of Problems and Opportunities of “Rights” in Digital Collection Building

Copyright

John P. Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust and associate research librarian for the University of Michigan, provides an in-depth report on the current percentages of published works that are at various stages of public domain and in-copyright. He explains that ascertaining the extent of the institution’s collections, the number of orphan works (holder of copyright unavailable), and the number of works in-copyright, enables librarians and archivists to develop strategies for storage and circulation of items particularly suited for academic institutions. A comprehensive bibliography with complete metadata enables scholarship found lacking in many large-scale bibliographic resources, including WorldCat and Google Books. Although Wilkin acknowledges these sources facilitate discovery through their search and retrieval interfaces, the quality of information provided is limited primarily to publication data. He suggests a significant amount of gray literature and orphan works are unavailable due to copyright restrictions and minimal cataloging. Thus, even within academic institutions, the patrons are unaware of potentially valuable resources. Using HathiTrust’s resources to survey the scope and categories of works ranging from public domain to in-copyright status, Wilkin concludes that the largest percentage of academic library collections are comprised of orphan works. In addition to the patron’s lack of access to these rich materials, these institutions incur great cost and unnecessary duplication of printed material for storage and maintenance.

Wilkin, John P.

Council on Library and Information Resources

2011

Polk, Victoria

CLIR

Report

http://www.clir.org/pubs/ruminations/01wilkin

Wilkin, John P. "Bibliographic Indeterminacy and the Scale of Problems and Opportunities of “Rights” in Digital Collection Building." Ruminations 1 (2011): 1-15. http://www.clir.org/pubs/ruminations/01wilkin